Went to see the
Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum yesterday. Well worth the £7 entry fee. There are about 100 original prints (and one copy) on display. These range from tiny 3'x2' prints from his early years spent on the headlands around San Francisco to some huge wall size prints from his National Park's images.
I spent about 2 hours there, and could easily have stretched that to 2½ if I'd had more time available. At the end of the exhibits there is a 10 minute excerpt from a BBC(?) documentary with Adams, explaining a little about his approach to his work and his thoughts for the then future of digital photography - which is now our present. He also had a few comments for those of us who have ever used exposure bracketing
People who have submitted to the
flickr group, and wonder what is happening to their pictures may be interested to know that near the end there is a touch screen with the flickr images displayed, and visitors are asked to touch images which they find particularly appealing, or which they think are accurate representations of the Adam's style.
It was excellent to see the images as the photographer intended. You may have seen these pictures in books, or in the poorly scanned copies that you'll find on the web. But these only hint at the power of the real images.
I was interested to see that Adams put as much effort into the printing as he did into the original capture, and I got the impression from the documentary that he'd have been a significant proponent of digital post processing, but only in an attempt to create as accurate a picture as possible. The other fact which I took away was that he would choose his location and then spend as much as
2 days waiting for the right light before finally taking the shot. If it was a really crucial image, then:
"I might take two pictures in case the first one had a scratch on the negative"
But, when it all comes down to it, the main reason for visiting is the opportunity to see these pictures in the way that the photographer intended: at a proper size, and with sufficient time to appreciate them.